Death Wish

4

At the funeral he was still in a dark fugue, a dulled pervading unreality.

It was the wrong day for a funeral. The heat had dissipated, the inversion layer had gone somewhere; it was a mild day filled with sunshine and comfort. Funerals had a rainy association for Paul and the chiseled clarity of Friday’s air made the incidents even less real.

That first night — Esther had died Tuesday — they had sedated him and he only vaguely remembered the taxi ride to Jack’s apartment. Jack had given him the bed and in the morning Paul had found him in the living room on the couch, smoking, drinking coffee; Jack hadn’t slept at all.

Paul had emerged from his drugged sleep neither rested nor alert. The unfamiliar surroundings heightened his sense of existential surrealism: it was as if he had been born fully grown half an hour before, into an alien world of meaningless artifice. He had forgotten nothing; but when he found Jack in the living room and they began to talk, it was as if they were actors who had sat in these same places and said the same lines so many times that the words had lost all intrinsic meaning.

The city coroners had sent someone around to obtain Jack’s signature on an autopsy-permission form which Jack disagreeably pointed out was a senseless absurdity since in crimes of violence that resulted in death it was automatic to perform a postmortem examination. The Medical Examiner had announced that the body would be released on Thursday; to which funeral home should it be sent?

Trivial mechanical details. Decisions to make. Should there be a religious service? If not, how did you go about conducting a burial ceremony?

She had not been religious; neither was Paul. They both came from religiously indifferent backgrounds, nominally Jewish, effectually disinterested. Even their political causes and charitable interests had been nonsectarian; they had never supported Zionism or the Temple or the B’nai Brith.

But in the end Jack had telephoned someone and got the name of a rabbi.

They did it because it was the easiest solution and because Esther had always been comforted by ceremony. “It’s the least we can do,” Jack had said somewhat obscurely — what more could be done for her now? — and Paul had acquiesced because he had no reason to object, and no energy for dispute.

You preserved a modicum of sanity only because there were so many idiotic decisions you had to make. When was the funeral to take place? The burial? Whom should you ask to attend? In the end he found that the funeral director took care of most of the details and the rest sorted itself out: their closer friends telephoned, and after accepting their condolences with as much grace as he could produce, Paul told them the services would be held Friday at two-thirty, gave them the address of the funeral home and listened numbly to their repeated expressions of sympathy.

Still he was surprised by the number of people who put in appearances. The rabbi, who had never met Esther, spoke briefly from a simple dais in a chapel-room in the mortuary. His remarks were dutiful and innocuous; afterward they all went out onto the curb on Amsterdam Avenue and there was a fairly well directed confusion of finding seats in limousines and organizing the vehicles of the cortege in the proper order. Sam Kreutzer and Bill Dundee stopped on the way to their cars to touch Paul on the arm and speak murmured words. Several people from the office were there and he was surprised to see a client here — George Eng, the Chinese executive vice-president of Amercon, with whom he and Kreutzer had lunched Tuesday.

Two couples from their apartment house came; and there were various cousins and nephews and nieces from Manhattan and Queens; and Esther’s sister-in-law from Syracuse, representing Esther’s brother Myron who had a minor diplomatic post in Malaysia and had been unable to come. He had, however, sent the largest of the floral arrangements.

Paul found himself standing at the graveside cataloguing the attendance as if there were some point giving good marks to those among their acquaintances who had chosen to appear here.

The casket had been closed from the outset; there had been no viewing. Paul had not seen her since he had left the apartment Tuesday morning; she had been following the vacuum cleaner from room to room. He felt no desire to view her remains and had suffered impatiently through the “mortuary scientist’s” obsequious explanations of why it would be best to do it this way. Boiled down it amounted to the fact that she had been mauled badly by the attackers and the autopsy surgeons had cut her up considerably, and while it was possible for the morticians to put her back together, it would be expensive and unsightly. On the way out of that meeting Paul had been surprised when Jack had made a bitter remark about “plastic surgery on the dead”; it was not Jack’s usual tone, it betrayed his strain. Throughout the week Paul had been quite alert to other people’s behavior, he had observed their reactions to the events without ever wholly observing his own. It was as if reaction was still to come: he existed in a hiatus of emotion, waiting for the explosion or the crash or the tears, whichever it was to be. He half expected to go off like a Roman candle.

Jack stood beside Carol, holding her arm. Carol was stiff in protest against all of it. Like her father she had not yet come out of it; unlike him she had withdrawn into an obvious shell. Her eyes windowed resentment more than anything else. She looked terrible, he thought: she stood with a caved-in posture, her hair hung damp and heavy against her face. Ordinarily she drew the second glance of most men but now she looked old, hard, furious: as if she were nobody’s daughter.

Possibly it was partly the result of the drugs. She had been under sedation for most of the first three days because whenever they stopped dosing her she would tighten up like a watchspring and if you touched her, her rigid body would jerk galvanically. Yesterday he had reached for her hand, trying to make contact; her hand was ice-cold and she had pulled it away, clamped her lips shut, averted her face. She hadn’t gone into total shock — she could converse quite rationally, in a voice that lacked its usual expressiveness — but Paul was worried about her. Jack had agreed she might need psychiatric looking-at if she didn’t pop out of it in another day or two. Perhaps after the funeral she would begin to loosen up.

The casket was in the grave, the ropes had been withdrawn; the rabbi stopped talking and people began to drift away. A few came by to speak to Paul or to Carol; most of them — the ones who were discomfited by other people’s suffering — left quickly, trying to look as if they were not hurrying away.

Henry Ives, the senior partner in the firm, stopped to say, “Of course you needn’t come back to work until you feel up to it. Is there anything we can do, Paul?”

He shook his head and said his thank-yous and watched Ives hobble away toward his waiting Cadillac, a bald old man with age-spots in his skin. It had been kind of him to come; probably he disliked these reminders more than most did — he was at least seventy-three.

Jack said, “We may as well go.”

He stared down at the casket. “I guess so.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay over here for a few days?”

“No. You don’t really have room. It’d be crowded — we’d be on each other’s nerves,” Paul said.

He sensed Jack’s relief. “Well, just the same. At least stay the evening. We’ll whip up something out of the freezer.”

In this poor indoor light somehow the bruises under Carol’s makeup were more evident. She sat down on the couch, crossed her legs and leaned forward as though she had a severe pain in her stomach. “I’ll fix something in a little while.”

“It’s all right, darling, I’ll do it.”

“No.” She was snappish. “I’ll do it myself.”

“All right, fine. Just take it easy.” Jack sat down by her and put his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t stir.

“Maybe we ought to call Doctor Rosen,” Paul suggested.

It brought her eyes around against him. “I’m perfectly all right.” She shot to her feet and walked out of the room, moving heavily on her heels. Paul heard things crashing around in the kitchen.

“All right,” Jack muttered. “Let her get it out of her system.” He looked around. “I’m half surprised the place hasn’t been ransacked.”

“What? Why?”

“Burglars always read the obituaries. They know nobody’s going to be home at the time of the funeral.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Most break-ins happen in daylight. That’s when people aren’t home. These guys that attacked Mom and Carol — that was in broad daylight.”

Paul shed his black suit jacket and sat down in his shirtsleeves. “Does she have a better recollection of it yet? Does she remember what they looked like?”

“I don’t know. She still doesn’t want to talk about it and I haven’t wanted to press her. She remembers it, of course — she’s not amnesiac. But she’s repressing it with everything she’s got. It’s only natural.”

“Yes. But the police need something to go on.”

“I talked to Lieutenant Briggs this morning on the phone. We’re going to take her up there Monday morning to look at their mug books and see if she can pick them out.”

“Has she said anything at all about it?”

“The other night she talked about it a little. When the Lieutenant came to the hospital. I was pleased how gentle he was in his questioning. He managed to get things out of her that I couldn’t. A real professional — I wish there were more like that guy.”

“What did she say?”

“Evidently there were three of them. Young men, probably teenagers. She said they — laughed a lot. As if they were hysterical.”

“Drugs?”

“I suppose so. It must have been. Either that or they were totally psychotic, but anybody who behaves like that all the time wouldn’t still be on the streets — they’d have been picked up a long time ago.”

“Did she tell you how they got into the apartment?”

“She told Lieutenant Briggs. I gather Mom and Carol had just come back from the supermarket. They got back up to the apartment and a few minutes later somebody knocked at the door and said he was the delivery boy from the market. When she opened the door this kid was standing there with a big cardboard carton. Mom thought it was the groceries so she let the kid in. The minute he was inside the door he dropped the carton — it turned out to be empty, the cops went over it for fingerprints but paper doesn’t take prints very well, all they found were smudges. Anyhow the kid pulled a knife and his two friends shoved into the doorway behind him. One of them grabbed Carol and the other two started punching Mom, demanding to know where she kept her money.”

“We never keep much money in the apartment.”

“She only had three or four dollars in her handbag — she was planning to go to the bank later that afternoon. And Carol only had ten or eleven dollars and a few subway tokens. We’ve been kind of watching our budget lately, we just bought this furniture and the payments are a bit more of a load than we thought they’d be.”

“So,” Paul said slowly, “when it turned out there wasn’t more than a few dollars in the place they flew into a rage, is that it?”

“That seems to be what happened. They must have been strung out on amphetamines, that’s the way it sounds. Evidently they giggled and laughed the whole time. Carol said that was the worst thing about it — they never stopped laughing. I think the reason they didn’t — hurt her as badly as they hurt Mom was that when she saw what they were doing to Mom it got to be too much for her and she passed out. Naturally she doesn’t remember anything that happened after that for a while. When she came to her senses they were gone. She had the presence of mind to get to the phone and call the police.”

Paul was grinding a fist into his palm. “They took the portable television and a couple of other things. You’d think someone would have seen them carting those things out of the building.”

“Evidently not. The three kids must have been hanging around the supermarket and saw Mom and Carol come out without any packages. That would indicate they were having the groceries delivered. Then the three kids probably followed along to the apartment house. You know the way that doorman of yours always greets you by name? So it wouldn’t have been any trick for them to find out Mom’s name — the doorman chirping at her, ‘Hello, Mrs. Benjamin,’ and the building directory right there by the front door with everybody’s name opposite a doorbell button. So they found out her name and apartment number, and then Lieutenant Briggs’s best guess is they went around on Seventy-first Street down to that condemned tenement building half way down to the dead-end. It’d be no big deal to get into that building and through the basement into that big courtyard behind your building. Then all they’d have to do would be to break into the basement of your building. It’s not the first time burglars seem to have used that route to get into the building. If I were you I’d talk to the super about putting locks and bars on those basement windows.”

“That’d be locking the barn after the horse has been stolen.”

“It’s not the last time somebody’s ever going to try breaking into that building, Pop. It’s happening every few minutes in this pressure cooker we all live in.”

Paul nodded vaguely. “It’s just so hard to believe. That’s what I can’t get into my head — such a senseless God damned murder.”

“Well, I doubt it was premeditated, Pop. I don’t think anyone kills with his hands unless he’s angry or drugged to the point of irresponsibility. Not this way.”

Paul felt it come: the quick steady blast of blinding rage. He said through his teeth, “Is that how you’d defend them?”

“What?”

“Your grounds for their defense. They weren’t responsible for their actions.” He put on a savage mimicking tone: “Your Honor, they didn’t know what they were—”

“Now wait a minute, Pop.”

“—doing.’ Now God damn it I don’t give a shit what you call it, this is deliberate cold-blooded murder and if you think—”

“I don’t think,” Jack said coolly, “I know. Of course it was murder.”

“Don’t humor me. I’ve seen you in court trying to make innocent victims out of your slimy guilty little clients. I don’t—”

“Pop, now you listen to me. Whoever did this to Mom and Carol, they’re guilty of first-degree murder. It’s the law — the felony murder law. Any death that results from the commission of a felony is first-degree murder even if the death was an accident, which God knows Mom’s death isn’t. They were committing a felony — assault with intent to commit robbery — and they’re guilty of Murder One, guilty as hell. My God, do you think I’m arguing against that? Do you honestly think I’d—”

“Yes, I think you would!” He hissed it with furious force. “Do you think your fine neat pigeonholes of legal technicality can explain away all this? Do you really think these savages deserve all that complicated fine print?”

“Well then, what would you suggest?” Jack was cool, soft, deliberate. “Catch them and string them up from the nearest rafter, is that the idea?”

“It’s better than they deserve. They ought to be hunted down like mad dogs and shot on sight. They ought to—”

“Pop, you’re just working yourself up. It’s not doing anybody any good. I feel the same way you do, I understand exactly what you’re going through. But they haven’t even caught these bastards yet and you’re already jumping to the conclusion that some smart lawyer’s going to get them off the hook. What’s the use of aggravating things with useless speculations? They haven’t got these kids, for all we know they never will get them. Why get upset about miscarriages of justice that haven’t even happened yet?”

“Because I’ve seen the way these things work. Even if the police catch them they just go right out again through the revolving door — right back out onto the streets. And largely because of well-meaning bastards like you! Hasn’t any of this even made you stop and think about what you’re doing?”

“It’s made me stop and think,” Jack said. He turned his glance toward the kitchen. “Let’s just let it go at that for the moment, shall we?”

“What are you kids made out of? If I were you I’d have handed in my resignation two days ago and put in an application for a job on the District Attorney’s staff. How can you conceive of going back to your office and going right on defending these filthy little monsters?”

“It’s not all that simple and you know it.”

“Do I?” he demanded. “Isn’t that maybe our biggest failing? Copping-out with the complaint that it’s not all that simple? By God maybe it is all that simple and we just don’t have the guts to face it!”

“So you’d like to just strap on a pair of cowboy six-guns and go out there and gun them down, is that it?”

“Right now,” Paul said, “that is exactly what I’d like to do. And I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s the wrong idea.”

“My ears are pretty good, you don’t have to shout.”

“Sorry,” Paul snapped.

Jack sat there in his rumpled black suit, his hair standing out in wild disorder; his eyes mirrored a bitterness that Paul understood and felt.

Paul kept his eyes on Jack’s face too long; it made Jack get up and move to the liquor cabinet. “You want a drink?”

“I could use one.”

“Bet you thought I’d never ask.” Jack’s smile was too brief. He opened the cabinet door and poured two glasses half-full of Scotch. No ice, no mix. He handed one to Paul and went back to the couch. “I’m sorry if I seemed patronizing. I guess I was trying to be reassuring — not because it would calm you, but because with all this desperation in the air I needed calm words myself. Does that make sense?”

“Of course. I’m sorry I blew up.” But they were talking like cautious strangers now. He didn’t know which was worse.

Jack said, “All week I’ve been remembering something that happened — oh, two-three years ago. It must have been after midnight. I’d been up in midtown on some chore, something to do with a client, and it was a nice night so I was walking home. I ran into a teen-age girl outside Bryant Park. She was a wreck. It turned out she’d been gang-raped right there in the park. I gave her carfare and told her to call the police. I don’t suppose she ever did.”

“Why not?”

“She was kind of flippy. Probably being gang-raped wasn’t exactly her idea of a fate worse than death. She was sore at them, but not really mad. You know what I mean?”

“I can’t say I do, altogether.”

“What I guess I’m getting at is that so many of these things simply aren’t taken seriously any more. Or at least they’re taken for granted. Do you know what that girl said to me? She said she should have known better than to go into Bryant Park at that hour. She almost seemed to think it was her own fault. She wouldn’t have been raped if she hadn’t gone there. It’s a weird time we live in.”

“Are you trying to say,” Paul breathed, “that Carol’s mother invited this to happen by something she herself did?”

“Not at all. Don’t fly off the handle again. I suppose if both of you had lived as if you were in a besieged fortress — use the peephole religiously, never let a stranger inside the apartment, put extra locks on the doors, never travel outside the apartment without a vicious guard dog on a leash — I guess if you chose to live like that she might still be alive, but who can put up with that?”

Paul knew people who did.

“Look, Pop, I know this won’t set well right now, but in time you’re going to have to think of it as a tragic accident — as if a disease had struck her down, or a runaway bus on the street. It’s no good getting worked up into demands for vengeance and retribution. Even if they catch these three bastards and put them away for the rest of their lives it won’t really change anything.”

Paul waited for the inevitable It won’t bring her back but Jack never uttered it; perhaps, after all, he was not totally insensitive to the more blatant clichés.

“We both have to face that,” Jack droned on relentlessly. “In these times you have to feel inadequate if you can’t slip a door-lock open in three seconds with a plastic calendar card — every kid on the street can do that. Do you know the crime statistics? I hear them every other day from some sourpussed Assistant D.A. There’s an assault or a robbery every twelve seconds in New York — something like seventy thousand reported cases last year, and that’s probably less than half the number that didn’t get reported. In felony cases they only make arrests in about one-sixth of the cases and of those they only get convictions on about one-third. Of course in murder cases it’s a lot higher — the police usually solve about eighty percent of them, but still we have about three murders a day in the city. You and I and Carol and even Mom — we’re statistics now. On that God damned blotter. That’s what makes it so damned hard to maintain your personal perspective: To you and me this is the most devastating thing that’s ever happened — to the cops it’s something they see all the time, so often they just can’t keep getting worked up about it.”

Paul felt acid. “Thank you, Jack, you’re a balm and a consolation to me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a wise ass. But I’m in this business, I guess you could say — at least I’m on the periphery of it, I have to deal with the police every day. And I think you’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that nothing more is ever going to develop in this case. You’ve got to go on living, haven’t you?”

“No,” Paul said slowly, “you don’t have to go on living.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of that.”

He stood splayed with the drink in his hand. His lowered head swung back and forth like the head of a worn-out prelim fighter in the ring, trying to locate his opponent. “I’m not thinking about suicide, I didn’t mean that.” But he kept bulling it, thinking. His breathing was shallow; his sphincter contracted, he formed a loose fist. “I’ve never hit a man in anger in my life. Never called a black man ‘nigger’ or stolen a penny from any man. I’ve given money and my own time to a dozen worthwhile causes from block associations to the N-Double-A-C-P.”

“And this is the thanks you get,” Jack murmured. “I know, Pop. And it’s true, and there’s no answer to it.”

“There’s one answer I intend to demand. I want those three killers.”

“They’ll probably get them. They may not. But if they don’t, what do you plan to do? Turn your back on every decent principle you’ve ever stood for? Join the Birchers or the Ku Klux Klan?”

“Well, I don’t know what I’d do,” Paul said vaguely. “But Christ, there ought to be something.”

“You mean like hire a private eye? Or get a gun and go looking for them yourself? Those things only happen on television, Pop.”

“Well, just the same you may have hit on something there. A private detective might be—”

“Private detectives aren’t what the movies make them out to be, Pop. They exist for the purposes of getting divorce evidence and providing security services like industrial counter-espionage and bank guards. There are no private eyes who investigate murder cases, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to hold a candle to the police. At least the police have manpower and organization and know-how.”

“And total indifference.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You remember that policeman who stayed with us at the hospital?”

Paul even remembered his name: Joe Charles. “He was only a uniformed patrolman.”

“Sure. But he’s a human being. He does care, Pop. Some of them are corrupt and some of them don’t give a shit, but the cops aren’t really the pigs we made them out to be in college.”

“Like unto thee and me,” Paul growled. “It doesn’t change the fact — if your estimate is correct — that there’s an excellent chance these animals will never be brought to justice.”

“Justice — or revenge?”

“What difference does it make what you call it?”

Jack shook his head. “All I’m saying is you and I may never be able to do a thing about this. Obviously we can’t go out into the streets and find these killers ourselves. We wouldn’t begin to know where to look.”

“Then you’re saying we should just forget the whole thing. Go back to bed and pull the covers up over our heads.”

“Or write letters to the Times.”

It made Paul look at him; it was the kind of sarcasm you didn’t expect of Jack.

“I guess you’re right,” Paul said. “I guess you’re right.”

“We may have to get used to it, Pop.”

“I guess we can try.”